Continental: Driving You Safely

An interview with Mr. Jürgen Diebold, Director System Projects Design & Verification, Chassis & Safety Division, Continental

Gasgoo.com: Out of the consideration the future automotive development trend, what are the future technical trends of Electronic Brake System?

Jürgen Diebold: We believe that more and more safety functions have to be integrated into the electronic brake system in future, but the basic requirement is to guarantee the best stopping distance and further improve the performance of the brake system, which is also our first step. The next step is to improve the vehicle stability, and the third step is to network the electronic brake system with the other chassis systems to an integrated safety system. These 3 steps are the driving forces to the further development of the electronic brake system.

For us it’s very important to have the safety available for everyone, this means that besides the luxury vehicles also midsize and small vehicles must be equipped with more safety functions to make integrated safety systems available to everybody. We believe that the first priority should be, as in the US，Europe, and this week decided in Japan to have the ESC mandatory fitted in all vehicles. We have already seen the proof in the accident statistics in Europe. A direct comparison before and after a 100% fitment of the ESC in some vehicle fleets or for some OEM can be done and a dramatic decrease by up to 25% of all accidents with injuries and up to 35% of all accidents with fatalities can be reported. That’s why we are convinced, that for the electronic brake system the next logical step is to achieve the ESC as a standard equipment worldwide.

And then the next step is to integrate the predictive forward looking electronic brake system. The brake system getting radar sensors or short range laser sensor as “eyes”，is also affecting the design of the electric brake system, because the faster the brake system could build up the brake pressure and therefore the brake force the better the whole system performance is at the end. From this requirement we will see a trend towards higher dynamic brake force build-up with electric brake systems.

Last but not least, we have the trend of hybrid and electric vehicles, so here we are changing the complete architecture of the vehicles. We have vehicles with only a little vacuum or even no vacuum in full electric vehicles in the future. As the vacuum is a support-power-supply to the brake systems today, this is also changing the development requirements for the electronic brake system. We need to implement e.g. a blending between the regenerative braking while we can charge the batteries with the decrease of vehicle speed in generator mode of the electric drive and the friction brake, if a stronger braking is necessary, because regenerative braking may not do a full emergency stopping.

But I believe for the consumer at the end, it does not make a big difference, how the vehicle will be decelerated and with which technology behind for what vehicle concept. The most important for all drivers of a vehicle is what support he gets in a critical driving situation to avoid an accident and jury or fatality. The integrated safety systems with the prediction of traffic accidents, applying e.g. the brake automatically, are the most important driving forces in order to reduce traffic fatality.

Gasgoo.com: ContiGuard® has been launched at international automobile IAA in 2007. What’s the application status in Europe nowadays?

Jürgen Diebold: Since 2007 many vehicles came to the market with ContiGuard® products and functions, we have had e.g. a market launch in 2009 for a leading Korean OEM, which was our first customer for the third generation millimeter wave radar sensor. This vehicle is equipped with an emergency brake system for the full speed range, Forward Collision Warning, Adaptive Cruise Control and a Reversible Restraint Control. Continental supported the launch by system development including the electronic brake system, the radar sensor and even the air suspension system with enhanced damping control. Another example for a market launch is the Volvo XC 60, S60, with the short range lidar sensor from Continental for the Emergency Brake Assist at low speeds for city driving. It has been on the market since 2008 – and as a standard equipment. In 2009, a car model from a leading Japanese OEM, was launched with our acceleration force feedback pedal, for the forward collision warning. If the driver is running into a critical traffic situation，he will get a haptical force feedback as a warning. Imagine, you are driving, and you can feel a kind of push back at your foot, you immediately can understand that you should release the accelerator pedal and slow down. You don’t need to think what the warning beep is about and what would be the appropriate reaction. It is so easy to understand because you are already doing the right measure, when releasing the pedal - you slow down.

In 2008 we have launched a car model from a leading German OEM with our camera sensor for lane keeping support, including the electronic power steering, the power pack and the electronic control unit from Continental. The system is able to detect the lane marker and evaluates if the vehicle is getting off the road involuntarily. We are supporting the driver, while he is getting inattentive or slowly reacting by e.g. looking for somewhere else, distracted by the mobile phone or even feeling sleepy. Then the vehicle is guiding the driver to get back to his lane, he can feel a push back to his own lane by a steering intervention. It’s not steering back autonomously, but it is having a higher resistance while driving over this lane marker. You can feel it and understand intuitively - that’s really helpful.

In 2009 another leading German OEM asked us to do the system development for emergence brake assist. We supply the third generation radar sensor and the chassis controller. The model of the leading German OEM is equipped with Adaptive Cruise Control Stop & Go, Forward Collision Warning, Emergency Brake Assist and reversible seat-belt pretension.

Finally a leading German OEM is also our customer, with whom we had the first launch in 1999 with our first generation radar sensor and Adaptive Cruise Control. In the meantime, we have had many market launches in the leading German OEM for components to support ContiGuard® function, it’s not only E-class and S-class, and basically all of its vehicles are available with our sensor technologies for ContiGuard®, even the truck. It was announced in a press release by the leading German OEM that they will go with our system first on the market and react on already stationary objects with their trucks.

We have currently especially for Emergency Brake Assist City with our cost attractive short range lidar sensor a rising demand - 5 more contracts with OEM coming very soon on the market, and also A Segment cars will be among them. You will see next year 2 launches from this technology. Continental is the market leader in Advanced Driver Assistance System since we entered the market 1999 and our market share continues to grow and stay on top. For example, innovative technologies by Continental figure prominently in the most recent generation of the all-new Ford Focus and the Ford C-MAX multi-activity vehicle (MAV). The latter shares a common platform with the Focus. This marks the first time that an emergency brake assist is available on a compact car.

Gasgoo.com: How to control the cost of ContiGuard®?

Jürgen Diebold: At the very beginning when we started developing ContiGuard® we set up the goal to have a scalable technology, in order to address all vehicle classes, all segments from small car, midsize car up to luxury car. That was a precondition at Continental to start the development of ContiGuard®.

As a supplier, we need permanently to improve our cost structure, so we are relying on high volume production; therefore it is essential, that our technology is scalable to serve from luxury cars to small cars. Taking a radar sensor as an example, it was essential to have this scalability for the sensor hardware. We are developing a radar sensor family, which means the hardware can be scaled in terms of calculation power, in terms of memory size and in the antenna design. But still for the car manufacturers have the same size for packaging and same electric interface for the connector. An upgrade of the system is feasible with very little integration effort at the OEM side.

Gasgoo.com: How long does the cycle of developing ContiGuard® last? And what do you think is the most challenging part during R&D circle?

Jürgen Diebold: For us it doesn’t make any difference in development time if we develop a ContiGuard® system or another system. Because as usual the development cycle is 2 years for an application development, while application means that we are already in the market with this product with a first customer and then following up another customers.

In fact it’s not a challenge, but a normal development process; I would say it’s a different kind of development work. We need to take care about the system performance instead of component performance only, that's the difference. We have been doing this since many years now and not only for ContiGuard® but also for full brake systems including hydraulic and electronic break systems. For sure, not every customer is demanding system engineering by a supplier; some of them just buy components. Continental is prepared to support both, component and system supplying.

Gasgoo.com: What is the performance of the sensitive technologies on ContiGuard® under the bad weather?

Jürgen Diebold: There are different types of bad weather. For example some fog condition rain, snow or smoke. As there are different physical sensing technologies we need to differentiate between the different weather situations.

In general, optical systems like laser or camera are comparable to the human eyes regarding degradation of visibility due to bad weather conditions. For our short range laser with a detection range of 10 meter ahead of our vehicle, the power of the laser is sufficient to illuminate even under severe conditions in the short range. Starting at a detection range of 100 meters lidar sensor are affected under severe fog conditions, that’s why Continental is working with radar sensor for mid and long range detection.

When radar sensors are covered by snow, the system is blind, as the radar waves are absorbed by the snow. Here we are implementing a self-diagnosis to detect this situation and shut off the system while displaying it to the driver. Radar sensors are the most robust systems on the market and the least affected sensors by bad weather conditions.

Riding on a muddy road, also the camera could be covered with a lot mud, which could make you blind. Then there is also a self-detection available showing to the driver that the system is not operating because the sensor is dirty or covered by mud

Gasgoo.com: Do you have any plans on Chinese market in the near future?

Jürgen Diebold: Yes. The first launch of our short range lidar sensor for the Emergency Brake Assist at low speeds has already been this year with Volvo. Also the leading Korean OEM is selling the export vehicle with ContiGuard® in one of its car models in China already. And we do have plans to extend our Technical Center here in Jiading District by System Engineering Tech Center for ContiGuard®. Also you will see we have already scheduled projects. In two years the next generation of ContiGuard® will be launched here in China.